Oberlin, Ohio, was a particularly important venue in nineteenth-century America.
Founded in 1833 on Christian evangelical principles, the colony was organized
to host an institution of higher education to train teachers and preachers
to fan the flames of the Second Great Awakening in what was then the American
west. Including women in its classes from its inception, the Oberlin Collegiate
Institute (later Oberlin College) became a pioneer in coeducation, and, after
a decision in 1835 to accept students of color, an avid proponent of racial
egalitarianism and a hotbed of antislavery activism. Women and men came to
Oberlin to promote the religious salvation of their world, seeking conversion
of all people from the sins of disbelief, intemperance, licentiousness, and
slavery. Female participants embraced their gendered responsibilities for
domestic virtue, finding in “woman’s sphere” an empowering call to action
within their homes and communities. In Oberlin, they formed social, religious
and benevolent organizations, bringing to their homes and communities their
influence as moralists and reformers. Well connected to national networks,
they both shaped and responded to the emergent debate about the place of women
in social movements, and their relation to public activities. Indeed, while
Oberlin College supported education as a means to enhance the usefulness of
women in their religious missions, men and women in the college and the community
struggled to define the proper parameters for female labors.[1]

Were the Protestant evangelical women of Oberlin innovators and rebels who
enacted in social movements new roles for women? Did they challenge men’s
dominance while broadening their realm for action? Or were they conservatives
who accepted subordination while embracing their distinctive gendered responsibilities?
Historians have offered quite different evaluations of women’s antebellum
reform efforts. Some scholars find in them the roots of an autonomous woman’s
rights movement while others argue that reform efforts reinforced the logic
for the relegation of Victorian women to the private and familial sphere.[2]
Careful study of the experience of Oberlin’s antebellum women offers an opportunity
to illuminate this historiographical debate, and explore the complex interplay
between women’s activism and controversies over the parameters of “woman’s
sphere.” At issue here as well are questions about whether the efforts of
Oberlin women embodied a form of class domination or a maternally inspired
attempt to nurture and empower the less fortunate. And looking at Oberlin
also suggests the importance of considering whether its female inhabitants
united around a single religiously inspired ideal of the “empire of woman.”[3]
Finally, women’s movements in antebellum Oberlin permit investigation of the
roles of men in relation to antebellum social movements: Did men in the Oberlin
community recognize and support the attempts of women to bring their particular
voice into the public sphere, or did they patrol the boundaries between male
and female action?

The documents in this project demonstrate that the story of Oberlin women
before the Civil War was neither an uncomplicated chronicle of progress towards
the realization of “woman’s rights” and interracial sisterhood, nor a tale
of the triumph of gender conservatives who effectively promoted domestically-enclosed
boundaries to women’s work. Rather, the historical record suggests the complexity
of the evangelical construction of womanhood, and its implications for pathways
to women’s empowerment. Moreover, it reveals a dynamic process, suggesting
that both local and national events contributed to the reshaping of women’s
social movements and their participants during the years in which the American
people wrestled with the issue of slavery in a democratic society.

These documents are arranged to illuminate the experience of antebellum Oberlin
women and their social movements by looking first at writings produced by
women before their entrance into the community, and then at selected sources
produced by women at Oberlin in conjunction with their formal associations.
Next it explores questions about women’s enactment of racial egalitarianism
and antislavery in this abolitionist community. Finally, it focuses on the
particular struggle for women’s public voices illuminated by controversies
over female activities at college commencement exercises.

Section One, "Getting to Oberlin: Backgrounds and Experiences of Early
Women in Oberlin College and Colony," suggests the foundations on which
Oberlin women built. These writings reveal how young women came to this outpost
of the Second Great Awakening already well connected to the networks of the
Awakening.[4] Some, like Mary
Caroline Rudd were literally the daughters of women active in the prior generation
of women’s benevolent and charitable organizations (see Document
1). Others, like Hannah Warner, were self-conscious recruits into a social
movement that provided a place for their intellectual endeavors. They embraced
the opportunity to become part of an institution where they could pursue “the
consecration of body, soul and spirit and a determination to do every known
duty in the spirit and meekness of Christ” (see Document
4). Moreover, they hailed from all sections of the “Benevolent Empire,”
including followers of Charles Finney who advocated the centrality of the
religious experience of salvation, and other factions that instead foregrounded
the social implication of the Second Great Awakening, particularly abolition.
They recruited friends, relatives and fellow activists to nurture the community.
Mary Mahan, wife of Oberlin’s first president, reached across religious lines
to seek the advice of Theodore Dwight Weld on the possible employment of the
Quaker-identified female antislavery advocate Angelina Grimké as a teacher
with manner, mind, and morals congruent with Oberlin (see Document
2). Mrs. Mahan’s household helper and confidant Sally Rudd urged her niece
Caroline Mary Rudd to seize her opportunity for a “complete education” while
maintaining her domestic role by contributing her labor to the Mahan household
(see Document 3). As the early compositions of Mary
Sheldon suggest, female students came to Oberlin already imbued with social
and religious critiques of a society threatened by the decadence of aristocratic
institutions like dueling and affected pretensions like the wearing of corsets,
and arguing for the political implications of the empowerment of women within
their domestic roles (see Document 5A, Document
5B and Document 5C).

Section Two, "Social Movements and Social Commitments: Women and Their Organizations
in Antebellum Oberlin,” explores how women came together to promote their
intertwined commitments to evangelical religion, racial egalitarianism, and
female education. As Oberlin grew, women established a Maternal Association
for mothers to discuss and improve their practices for rearing Godly and moral
children. Older women of the community, particularly the wives of college
faculty, joined with their younger counterparts to establish a Female Moral
Reform Society to keep at bay “that Monster of impurity” that might threaten
Oberlin if male lust were left unchecked[5]
(see Document 6A and Document 6B).
Interestingly, the men of Oberlin supported this organization by forming their
own male auxiliary to the female group, thereby establishing the third largest
male contingent in the United States.[6]
The Young Ladies Literary Society served as a proving ground not only for
women’s rhetorical skills, but also for their organizational capacities (see
Document 8).

Mary Sheldon’s address to the Oberlin Female Antislavery Society suggests
the particular role that Oberlin women assumed in the battle against the racial
prejudice that they viewed as a key component of the slave system (see Document
7). Section Three, “Oberlin Women of Color and the Struggle for Racial
Equality,” offers further documents that suggest how the college and the colony
daily enacted a practical approach to abolition. By educating students of
color, and men and women, in the same classrooms and with the same standards,
Oberlin College occupied a unique position. Moreover, it offered the most
challenging educational program then available for women of African-American
descent, thereby playing a particularly important role in their empowerment.
Internationally known for these commitments, Oberlin attracted the support
of prominent antislavery activists in the antebellum United States and England.
Author Harriet Beecher Stowe turned to Oberlin to enroll two young women recently
liberated from slavery; she sought to support them in their efforts to become
teachers to freed people in the United States and fugitives in Canada (see
Document 9A, Document 9B and Document 9C). Despite principled commitments
to equality, racial tensions were not unknown in Oberlin, where, in 1851,
the Ladies Board, charged with regulating the behavior of female students,
found itself called upon to mediate a confrontation between young Black and
white women (see Document 10).

Women of both races went forth from Oberlin committed to its goals of the
empowerment of people of color. Lucy Woodcock, a white female graduate of
1852, left Oberlin to launch a career in Jamaica, where, under the sponsorship
of the American Missionary Association, she devoted her life to the education
of its freed people. Her letters document not only her commitment to empowerment
through education, but also her continuing attention to the progress of racial
equality in the United States as it entered the Civil War (see Document
11A, Document 11B and Document
11C). African American female graduates Louisa Alexander and her friend
Amanda Thomas Wall are examples of the large number of women of color who
attended Oberlin before the Civil War and later joined the efforts to bring
teachers to the newly emancipated people of the American South.[7]
Braving the difficulties of securing placement, as well the intricate politics
of race in the post-war world, they nonetheless remained determined to continue
the work of racial uplift (see Document 12A, Document 12B and
Document 12C).

Throughout the antebellum era, the character of women’s roles remained a point
of controversy. Section Four,“Testing the Limits: Oberlin Women and the Struggle
to Make Their Own Case,” illuminates some of the points of contention. Although
autonomous women’s organizations provided avenues for women’s activism, women
in Oberlin generally eschewed direct interventions in politics and carefully
avoided calls for women's full public participation. Proper female behavior
remained carefully and conservatively regulated; when questions emerged about
the behavior of a young widow appointed as principal of the Female Department
in 1849, no appeal to circumstances or sympathy was successful in overturning
the College’s decision to dismiss her (see Document 13A
and Document 13B).

Joint education or coeducation at Oberlin earned full acceptance, even while
women’s roles remained circumscribed (see Document 15
and Document 16). Women learned oratorical and organizational
skills within their antislavery, moral reform, and literary societies. But,
while women spoke their own pieces at the special exercises marking their
completion of the Ladies Literary Course, they had no public voice at the
collegiate commencement ceremonies until the eve of the Civil War. Some individuals,
including abolitionists Lucy Stone and Sallie Holley, as well as Antoinette
Brown, a student in the Theology Course from 1847 to 1850, chafed at limitations
on their activities. Stone protested the inability of women graduates of the
collegiate course to present their own graduation addresses by refusing to
write a composition that would have been read for her by a male member of
the faculty. Yet, with Brown, Holley, and others, she took her rhetorical
training into a post-Oberlin career in public speaking.[8]
Eventually, even gender conservatives recognized the shifting boundaries of
women’s roles. As the documents on Mary Raley indicate, by 1859, Oberlin’s
female graduates from the classical course projected their voices from the
collegiate commencement podium (see Document 14).
But even as they claimed the right to speak, most female graduates still clung
to graduation essay topics that evoked their more domestic interests (see
Document 17).

Oberlin women and their social movements thus illustrate how women empowered
by education and associational activity navigated the tensions between autonomy
and subordination. Early Oberlin women built upon personal and generational
roots to develop notions of cross-class and especially cross-racial empowerment.
African-American women did not always find full realization of Oberlin’s goal
of racial equality, but they nonetheless prepared themselves for the work
of racial uplift. Thus Oberlin educators, both consciously and unwittingly,
trained women preachers and speakers who pushed transformatively against the
boundaries of womanhood. While Oberlin alumnae generally eschewed direct confrontations
with prevailing notions of gendered propriety, they left Oberlin prepared
to engage in pioneering public roles.

By the time of the Civil War, Oberlin’s evangelical vision of redemption had
evolved into a quest for emancipation from racial injustice in both the social
and political realms. Although the town’s male “voting abolitionists” became
devotees of a “higher law” in their militant struggle against slavery, Oberlin
women, black and white, took their own stands in multifaceted resistance to
racial oppression. In so doing, they not only claimed their place in the world
of education but also found their voices. At Oberlin, definitions of evangelical
womanhood changed incrementally over time. The result was a clear reworking
of the definitions of “public” and “private,” and their gender implications.